I acknowledge that hardware products take years to develop, and they already have a lot on their plate.
Perhaps Intel doesn’t care about consumer whims, but clearly there’s demand from companies like Google.
I’m just generally surprised at the lack of public-facing responses from Intel’s leadership around this and other security issues facing their platform. It all reads like lawyers trying to minimize their liability.
They’re one of the most important technology platforms today. Everything besides cellphones runs on Intel.
Despite actually being a monopoly or duopoly, they don’t have to be so stodgy. I want to love them for their profound impact these past few decades, but it’s hard when it feels like they don’t listen to their customers.
1. an Intel CPU that supports the vPro feature set
2. an Intel networking card
3. the corporate version of the Intel Management Engine (Intel ME) binary (well, definitely, a corporate laptop that used to get updates, but how do I check for ME?)
Is there a website I can visit that can initiate a remote takeover (I'm consenting to it)? Why isn't this possible? What other step is required on my side to make it possible? Is it possible only through the physical ethernet connection? Why aren't we seeing wide scale exploits based on AMT?
If the backdoor exists you will need to know a secret to open it. Currently, the public obviously doesn't know this secret or the doors would be wide open for virtually anybody. Because we don't know the secret key, we cannot open them to prove that they exist. So we don't know for sure if the backdoors exist. But the way the IME is designed and handled makes it possible and plausible that backdoors could exist. It's up to Intel to prove that they don't exist.
Even 14 years ago the FBI was using off cellphones as microphones, recording in-person conversations in a restaurant between some Mafia targets. It was acknowledged during a criminal trial, which means it was probably old-hat by then:
> Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off."
> He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.
https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdr...
Getting access to laptops/PCs regardless of power state with long-term persistence and very low detectability, regardless of traditional OS monitoring, would be top of the list in terms of requirements for any intelligence agency.
Doesn't the NSA_High_Assurance_Platform bit or whatever it's called pretty much prove there's a backdoor?
edit: Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#%22Hig...
Why would the NSA demand such a feature if they didn't foresee even a potential vulnerability there?
That seems a bit over the top to ask them to prove a negative.
Does this mean when the PC was connected by ethernet cable? Even by wifi? The exploit could have worked by visiting an arbitrary website? With no click? (I’m not being skeptical. I just want to understand what’s required for the exploit to work.)
In my mind, either a) There are other reasons and this is a convenient conscious or subconscious scapegoat; or b) it's an extremely emotional decision, and as such certainly relevant to holder ("Whatever floats your boat!":) but not necessarily applicable or translatable to anybody else.
I'd be curious (genuinely!) to hear more - were you actually tempted by any Thinkpads in the past but rejected them due to trackpoint, and if so can you elaborate why - what use case did they prevent or what inconvenience did they cause? Thx muchly! :)
The Wikipedia article they link about vPro says:
> Intel vPro technology ... [includes] VT-x, VT-d...
Does this mean that Purism hardware won't support virtualization extensions? Seems like that would be a big downside, and would make it a non-starter for a lot of people (including myself).
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/149091/...
(They have also added a small asterisk to the Purism article to clarify - I'm also just reading it now so don't know if it was there before)
Also, Intel sucks at marketing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/out-of-band-clien...
I haven't been able to figure out what exactly this means, but it does seem to be disabled after system initialization. Kind of like Intel's HAP bit, except user-settable.
https://puri.sm/posts/anti-interdiction-services/
From the site:
-Customized tamper-evident tape on the sealed plastic bag surrounding the laptop itself
-Customized tamper-evident tape on the internal, branded box
-Glitter nail polish covering the center (or all) screws on the bottom of the laptop
-Pictures of all of the above plus pictures of the inside of the laptop before sealing the bottom case
-All pictures sent to the customer out-of-band, signed by Purism and encrypted against the customer’s GPG key
-All coordination occurring over GPG-protected email
this line strikes me as odd. Don't OEMs normally have a contract with Intel (or someone that does) for licensing the motherboard design that would prevent them from doing this?
There is no reason to believe the software switch is working, especially when even a system integrator can accidentally enable the features. If someone wants them on they turn on.
Purism sells snakeoil. Presenting their offerings as FOSS-compatible would be honest. Claiming additional security is not.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...
I'm surprised you didn't mention the FSP which is a binary blob from Intel required to be run by any boot firmware (UEFI, Coreboot, or whatever) very early in the platform initialization process (to my understanding, basically as soon as possible after the reset vector, in the PEI phase) before anything is useable.
Baby steps. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Success here could indicate to CPU vendors there are people who care about these things.
If the Libreboot FAQ[1] is to be believed, then we are well past this stage. It states:
> Even Google, which sells millions of chromebooks (coreboot preinstalled) have been unable to persuade them.
Even neutered Intel seems unnecessarily risky.
ARM is no better, either, at least in practice. Their relatively friendly licensing terms would allow a vendor willing to make their own silicon in volume to ship a no-TrustZone, no-Secure-Boot SOC. However, nobody does this. In fact, moving to ARM has traditionally been used as an excuse to lock out third-party operating systems and unlicensed software. (Remember Windows RT tablets?)
This was my recent experience choosing between a new XPS 13 or a T14s amd. Side by side the screens weren't that different. Port selection, keyboard quality, and trackpoint availability were the tiebreakers in favor of the Thinkpad. (Didn't care much about the performance difference due to my light use case.)
flashbacks from 2010 incoming ...
I still don't understand why people accepted the downgrade back then so easily, some of them even thinking 16:9 is somehow more modern or better.
